Free Software
Today in the computer world much of the software industry is controlled by large businesses like Adobe Systems and Microsoft, that hold virtual monopolies over their products. This allows them to charge ludicrous prices for their products. For example, a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 costs around $650 and the Home & Student version of Microsoft Office starts at $149.95 (the Professional version costs $500!). These prices make it so regular people have to pay through the nose just to buy basic software. Fortunately, there exists a lot of open source software that you can get for free and is just as good as the overpriced mainstream software. From Linux to Frets on Fire there exist many free (or at least very cheap) alternatives to expensive software. Linux As we are fighting to break free from corpgov, we should be freeing our computer systems from huge corporate giants like Microsoft and Adobe as well. Linux and BSD are free as in, "Take one; you can have it for no price," but much more importantly it is free as in liberty do with it as you see fit. The fact that the code is open to review makes it more secure as anyone catching a security bug can update or notify the project. This makes for our favorite operating systems and accompanying software to be capable of being very secure against hacking, viruses, and exploitation remotely or locally. Live CD A good way to start off is to play around with a Live CD, where you boot straight from the disk instead of the hard drive. Once you get used to it and can tell that your computer parts all work with the distro and version you want, and after you've backed up the things you need on your hard drive, install it. It feels very liberating to wipe Microsoft off of your disk but it might be useful to have for some programs. You can either keep it on a different partition on your hard drive or use a program like QEMU or VirtualBox to emulate Windows within Linux. * QEMU * VirtualBox Ubuntu Ubuntu is considered by many to be the easiest Linux distribution to use, with lots of tutorials available to get anything working like it should. You can download the CD and burn it yourself or have them sent to you for free, usually within a month. Ubuntu now has a very excellent windows installer which does away with the need to burn an installation disk and will create an Ubuntu install alongside your windows installation until such time as you want to wipe windows for good. As far as preparing yourself; try going down the open source software and Firefox/online document/email route as far as you feel comfortable than when you swap you will hardly notice the difference! Backtrack Test your knowledge of networks and systems with this Linux distribution designed specifically for penetration testers and hackers. With over 300 tools designed for offensive security, this distro is any hacker's dream come true. The only downside is the lack of easily accessible live CD's. Remote-Exploit, the makers of Backtrack, offer both a CD and USB version of their distro, but there are no endorsed distributors. It is most useful in case your forget your admin password to someone else's computer. ParanoidLinux ParanoidLinux, an idea originally fictional in Little Brother (a book itself partly inspired by the Steal This Wiki project), is an extremely secure OS that works under the assumption that the government is tracking you and your privacy is at stake. Although it is a long way off from a stable beta there is one release right now, a suped up and buggy version of Ubuntu. Office Suites Bean A Macintosh word processor program (more of a Rich Text editor) but not an all-in-one suite. To quote the website, "Bean is not a replacement for MS Word. It doesn't do footnotes or pre-defined styles and is only partially compatible with Word's file formats.", Still, it's free and open source. Runs on OS X 10.4+ Tiger or OS X 10.5+ Leopard. Mozilla Mozilla, the creators of the original Mozilla web browser produce excellent (and free!) open source programs. The following is a list of most of their creations, which can be downloaded at http://www.mozilla.org/ . : Firefox - Arguably the most well known open source program around, Firefox is one of the fastest, most lightweight web browsers available. It is almost infinitely extensible with over thousands of plug-ins and themes. : Minimo - A web browser for mobile devices such as cell phones and PDA's. : SeaMonkey - An "All-In-One" internet application suite with Web-browser, advanced e-mail and newsgroup client, IRC chat client, web development tools and an HTML editor. : Sunbird - The Mozilla calendar application. It lets you easily manage upcoming events and obligations. : Thunderbird - An easy to use e-mail application, rss reader, and Usenet newsgroup reader. It has a huge number of plug-ins, like all Mozilla apps, one of which adds on calendar abilities to Thunderbird. OpenOffice.org/NeoOffice OpenOffice.org is a full function, multiplatform office suite that is basically the open source alternative to Microsoft Office. It includes a word processor and desktop publisher ("Writer") , a calculator ("Calc"), a presentation program ("Impress"), a database ("Base"), a vector graphics editor ("Draw") and a mathematical formula editor ("Math"). In short, it does pretty much what Microsoft Word, Publisher, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Equation Editor all do, but it's free to download and use, supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange and has no licensing hassles (PDL and LGPL). To quote the website, "the software looks and feels familiar and is instantly usable by anyone who has used a competitive product". It is available for Windows (98 through Vista), Mac OS, Linux, Solaris, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIX platforms. You can even burn copies onto CD-ROM and give them away. NeoOffice is an offshoot of OpenOffice.org designed exclusively for Mac OS X. Instant Messaging Pidgin Originally called Gaim, Pidgin is an instant messaging client that is compatible with many of the mainstream clients (AIM, MSN, etc.). This allows you to have all of your messaging accounts available in one program. Pidgin is easy to use, and open-source as well. Graphics Inkscape An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Available in Windows, Mac and Linux. The GIMP GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program is basically the open source version of Adobe Photoshop. It has many of the same features as Photoshop and other popular image editing tools. These features include color support, selection and masking tools, paths, effects, scripts, and filters. One of the advantages over Photoshop is that GIMP does not take up the whole computer screen while you use it, all its windows can be shrunk down to make them more manageable. Also, there are many communities and forums for GIMP users. These communities give tutorials and allow artists to communicate and display their art on the internet. Scribus Scribus is a document creating software similar to Adobe PageMaker and Adobe InDesign. It allows you to create PDF files and allows you to manipulate your documents much better than in Microsoft Word. It features many different fonts and allows you to insert images and text. Full tutorials are available online for free. Audio-Video Ardour Ardour is a digital audio workstation. Its capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-linear, non-destructive region based editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a mixer whose capabilities rival high end hardware consoles, lots of plugins to warp, shift and shape your music, and controllable from hardware control surfaces at the same time as it syncs to timecode. Audacity Audacity is a free-to-download software that allows you to record sound on your computer. You are able to choose between your computer's direct input, microphone input, phoneline, and stereo mix. Not only is Audacity good for recording your own music (as it allows an unlimited number of tracks per file adding too many tracks slows down the program and makes it glitch-y), the stereo-mix record function allows you to record whatever is playing through your speakers. This means that you can easily rip music from live-stream web-radio, music players, Purevolume, MySpace, etc. It comes with some basic built-in studio effects, like a hard-to-control reverb and delay patch, a quality fader function, phaser, flange, tempo/pitch controls, right v. left pan control, and volume control. The interface is very basic, easy to use and allows you to manually affect and change any bit of any track you're working with. MPEG Streamclip A free video converter, player and editor. It can also download videos from YouTube and Google by entering the page URL. Available for both Windows and Mac. SUPER SUPER (Simplified Universal Player Encoder & Renderer) is a Windows freeware program that can convert almost any audio or video format into any other, including I-pod format, mp3, mobile phone video, DVD format, and many more. It's free for unlimited use, and very simple to use. VLC VLC is a media player that supports almost all multimedia formats. It also allows you to easily create a music stream, which offers a great way to start up a Pirate Radio station! Miscellaneous Linux Audio Software * Shareware Music Machine * Sound and Midi software for Linux Games Frets On Fire Frets on Fire is an open source clone of the Guitar Hero games for the computer. To play you hold your keyboard like it is a Keytar, using keys F1-F5 as the frets and pressing enter to strum. The game features three songs by Finnish guitarist Tommi Inkilä, a tutorial, three levels of difficulty, a song editor which allows you to create tracks for other songs, and competition against other users online. Another feature is the ability to download different themes and songs for Frets on Fire off of fan communities and forums. Liberal Crime Squad A text-based role-playing simulation based on the story of the Symbianese Liberation Army. You control a single revolutionary determined to change America into a liberal state. Recruit, kidnap, infiltrate, and coerce your way into the nations eye and work against the stream to create your own country. Do not try at home. Tremulous Tremulous is a free and open-source first-person shooter game. It is multiplayer and can run on almost any halfway decent computer. The game has two teams, humans, using traditional weapons, and the much more original aliens. It is a 100mb download, and installed takes up exactly 99mb. Therefore it is portable. It runs on Window$ or Linux, and an unofficial Mac version exists. Wikipedia list of Open Source Games For some of these games, only the game engine is open-source software, and the game content is not open content, and is under a different license. Kracking/Serials Warning: If you search the web there are plenty of keygens and software cracks. But be aware that a high percentage of these programs or cracks include some form of nasty malware. We still recommend trying to get a free open source piece of software that meets your needs and won't require a hard disk format or worst case even a reflash of the bios for the worst malware. File Sharing BitTorrent The BitTorrent protocol allows for easy downloading of large files as well as aiding you with the dissemination of your own stuff. Using torrents, you can find anything (free!) from the latest movies and games to applications and operating systems. The BitTorrent protocol uses your upstream bandwidth to reshare as you are downloading. : Warning: Be sure to use PeerGuardian 2 or similar block lists if you download unlicensed content through P2P networks. This may protect you from being contacted by known copyright license collection organizations that are known to use questionable legal intimidation tactics. uTorrent One of the best torrent clients available, this torrent manager is extremely lightweight and easy to use. It makes torrent creation very easy and torrent downloading even easier. It supports encryption (which is always a good thing!) and also lets you pick and choose which files in a torrent you want to download. Vuze One of the most popular torrent clients, Vuze, formerly called Azureus, lives up to its reputation. It's full-fledged, fun to use, and has a very refined look and feel. While many of its features are included in other torrent clients, Vuze has taken things and optimized their performance while maintaining an ease-of-use that works for anybody. FrostWire Frostwire is a free, open-source alternative (it's essentially a clone) of Limewire, a popular P2P client. It's on this list because it supports torrent files as well as allowing you to access a large P2P network. It supports encryption, which is very important when using a torrent client, and even more important for P2P clients. Related Websites Open Clip Art Library Open Clip Art Library is described thusly: "This project aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used. All graphics submitted to the project should be placed into the Public Domain according to the statement by the Creative Commons." TinyApps TinyApps is a site where very small application software can be found (Mostly for Windows, but there's Mac and Palm available). Nearly everything is free and nothing listed on the site is larger than 1.44 Meg. "IDEA", a symmetric key block cypher, is a mere 448 BYTES! Other Software Download Points * Freeware Files * Freeware Home * FreeWareWeb * Download.com * NoNags * Only Freeware * Internet Archive * Shareware Music Machine (Music Software) * SnapFiles * Tucows